Dismal Email Stats

What would your boss say if you told them that your last email campaign had a 0.23% click-through and a 0.02% conversion rate?

Would your boss be patting you on the back for another job well-done, or do you live in my world where heads would be on the block? There is no Nuremberg Defense in email. If you’re the one that pushes the button, you are the one responsible for what happens after that.

I suppose that if this were a test campaign and your position that the campaign would bomb was vindicated by the results, you might offer a knowing smile. And I don’t know, maybe these numbers would have you doing back-flips, but honestly, I’m not thinking that I’d be too pleased….

The article talked about the DNC’s plan to unleash their 13 million email subscribers to try to push through President Obama’s economic agenda. In the email from David Plouffe on Friday the 13th, he let’s us know that, “In the next few weeks we’ll be asking you to do some of the same things we asked of you during the campaign — talking directly to people in your communities about the President’s ideas for long-term prosperity.”

So on Monday I received a message from Mitch Stewart (like these are all people that the average person will recognize….) asking me to host or attend a Pledge Project Canvass in my neighborhood this weekend.

I’m afraid that I already have plans for the weekend, and I’m sure that my wife has plans for me, too. If I’m lucky her plans are the same as mine….

The Washington Post quotes “one source familiar with the strategy” as saying:

“Members are going to be surrounded by this, and this is going to carry on for the next several weeks on this budget fight.”

So I’m guessin’ that I’ll have plenty of more opportunities if I miss this one….

The Washington Post goes on to say,

It remains to be seen, however, whether the millions who volunteered for and donated to Obama’s presidential campaign will bring that same energy and dedication to bear on the far more mundane task of trying to force a budget through Congress. Volunteering to help turn out the vote in a battleground state is one thing; knocking on doors to seek pledges of support for a budget proposal is entirely different.

All well-and-good, but here’s the part that I want to look at; the “numbers”….

Although the Obama team touted the 30,000 responses the e-mail drew from the volunteer community and the more than 3,000 house parties thrown in support of the stimulus package, a report in McClatchy Newspapers indicated that several events were sparsely attended.

So let’s do some quick email math. Let’s take a 13,000,000 email address deployment and say that it gets a 1% Bounce Rate, leaving us a total potential delivery (not to be confused with “deliverability” which when applied to this would change the stats to a more realistic view, but anyway….) to 12,870,000 email records/addresses.

We don’t know what the Render/Open Rate of the email campaign was, but we know that 30,000 responses out of 12,870,000 email addresses gives us a 0.23% Response Rate (whatever you define “response” to be). If a “house party” is the equivalent of a “conversion”, then we’re looking at a Conversion Rate of 0.02%